Disclosure: I work for a competitor of Cognito, FusionAuth.

I agree, the author is totally confused.

Lite is equivalent was available before, and there's been a lot of improvements to essentials and plus (passkeys, more customization options). It is a bit weird that you have to be in the Plus plan to export user activity logs, but pricing is difficult. Depending on the number of users you had, lite can cost quite a bit more (5x for 60k users).

The simple pricing, which was one of the key benefits of Cognito, has become more complex. I put together a spreadsheet to show the price changes here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Nm5BUOjFlqqvaeDTERJm...

It's pretty clear that while there are increased features, if all you need is login, the pricing has increased significantly if you are above 10k MAU. If you are under 10k users, it's a wash, of course.

This spreadsheet ignores quota increase, SAML users, and M2M tokens, which are all charged separately.

However, you can see the plus tier, which includes what was previously "Advanced security features" has gotten significantly cheaper (pricing for that feature sourced from https://medium.com/@demandapi/aws-cognito-advantages-pricing... ). So bravo to them for lowering that.

There's also complexity in switching tiers, since if you switch from Plus to Lite in the middle of the month, you'll be charged Plus for all users who logged in before the switch and Lite for all after. That's incidental, but still added complexity.

And, as a sibling comment notes, there's legacy pricing for anyone who has a user pool with at least 1 MAU in the last 12 months. This legacy pricing lasts until Nov 30, 2025, which gives folks a chance to migrate or adjust business models.

Post also doesn’t mention this from the pricing that means existing customers in free tier aren’t being suddenly charged:

Note:

1. Customers with existing user pools created on or before 10:00am Pacific Time, November 22, 2024 will continue having a free tier of first 50,000 MAUs. Advanced Security Features (ASF) will continue to be priced separately and will not have a free tier, just like it has been priced previously.

2. Additionally, customers are eligible to create new user pools with Lite tier in their existing accounts and count those MAUs against the free tier of first 50,000 MAUs. To be eligible, customers' accounts must have had at least 1 MAU in the last 12 months on or before 10:00am Pacific Time, November 22, 2024.

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> below market value

Unless you would like your data to egress from an AWS datacenter, in which case they are a very, very long way above market value.

> two great products

RDS is also pretty great, and KMS is a pretty good way to store a private key per environment.

EC2 sold below market rate ? S3 I could argue somehow (unconvincingly). But what's the argument for EC2 ?

Lots of comments about EC2's price. My personal experience is that we do not just pay for the computing power of EC2 but the productivity it offers: it's just magical that one can launch an availability group across multiple zones, set up its autoscaling rules, and let it run wild. Netflix used to build its platform on top of EC2s, and the result was that a single engineer can carry a pager for multiple services 24x7, stateful included, and still enjoyed great work-life balance. It's also amazing how hard it is for companies to replicate their own EC2 in their own data centers.

Speaking great products, DynamoDB is pretty good too, to the point that there's no open-source equivalent to it yet. Cassandra probably comes the closest, but it does not have true GSIs, no cross-table transactions, no easy and robust CDCs like DynamoDB streams, and its CAS is dog slow.

SQS is great too. To many people it's reliable and durable, and implements a pretty robust competitive consumer pattern.

SQS, SNS and Lambda are great as well

SES is imo their top tier service!

EC2? It has not been under market value for a decade now. It used to take 12-24 months of on demand pricing to buy the hardware outright in the 00s. Today it's under 6 months for every instance type. With GPU instances being measured in weeks.

S3? Laughs in egress costs.

AWS considered harmful.

Gotta love Step Functions, Lambda, and also Kinesis Firehose!

... ?

Compared to Hetzner? Come on.

Amazon just prices S3 and EC2 at not-insane rates because they shadow charge you for I/O and network traffic at 10x a competitive rate, things that people don't actually look at when evaluating cloud providers.

> I don't understand why AWS doesn't put more effort into Cognito without messing with pricing. It is such an effective loss-leader

AWS team\org business priorities, like P&L computation, changed pretty drastically in 2022-23.

Historically there were a lot of services built, run, and measured on the idea of solving customers diverse needs and making AWS a better place to run your business. This isnt a “loss leader” per se, but 1) profitability may not be your highest business prioirty 2) customers & shareholders valued growth & diversity of offerings above almost everything else 3) business units would set forward looking pricing based on marginal rates 2-3 years out under better utilization models 4) services would not-uncommonoly use “attribution” or “flow through” revenue models for P&L. Eg autoscaling doesnt have a meaningfully price, but it drives (hypothetically) 3% of EC2 instance hours. Autoscaling than books a portion of the 3% of instance hour revenue to their profit center. Cognito (or Route 53 or SSM where I worked) would use this sort of P&L model.

Circa 2022 AMZn shareholders, amazon execs, and the market more broadly turned to Revenue and Profit as the goal, no longer growth per se. This drastically changed a lot of internal business models. No more “free rides”, book revenue, define and execute a plan to be a many million dollar direct revenue business, the old “growth and better together” story wasnt selling.

And i dont think thats a bad thing per se, as a shareholder. I appreciate the focus on proving your value via pricing and usage. But there will be some sad “abandonware” and service shutdowns over the next few years.

> Almost every other SaaS vendor supports multi-region active-active and Cognito does not.

Who are we talking about here? Google and Azure?

What is active-active?

which do you recommend?

It’s mentioned in the blog the article links to.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/improve-your-app-authentica...

Drug dealers are sensitive to the price their market can bare, they don't let you use unlimited drugs then charge you at the end of the month.

Let me ask you, non-combatively: do you think they can keep this up?

Their stock is bumping along at $200. If they can keep people coming in and staying, then the stock can go brrrr for decades. But if they cant, eg the trickle of CTOs repatriating workloads to prem becomes a roar, it wont, and AWS will turn into IBM.

You clearly have strong opinions on how AWS operates, but their stock holders are happy bunnies. What's your prediction?